Risorgimento in Exile

Italian Emigres and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era

Maurizio Isabella

The first study to examine the Risorgimento in a transnational context

Revises our understanding of Italian liberalism and patriotism

Biographical appendix of the first-generation Risorgimento exiles

Risorgimento in Exile

Italian Emigres and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era

Maurizio Isabella

Description

The experience of exiles was fundamental for shaping Italian national identity. Risorgimento in Exile investigates the contribution to Italian nationalism made by the numerous patriots who were forced to live in exile following failed revolutions in the Italian states.

Examining the writings of such exiles, Maurizio Isabella challenges recent historiography regarding the lack of genuine liberal culture in the Risorgimento. He argues that these 'emigrés' involvement in debates with British, continental, and American intellectuals points to the emergence of Liberalism and Romanticism as international ideologies shared by a community of patriots that stretched from Europe to Latin America.

Risorgimento in Exile represents the first effort to place Italian patriotism in a broad international framework, revealing the importance and originality of the Italian contribution to European Anglophilia and Philhellenism, and to transatlantic debates on federalism. In doing so, it demonstrates that the Risorgimento first developed as a variation upon such global trends.

Risorgimento in Exile

Italian Emigres and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era

Maurizio Isabella

Table of Contents

Introduction: Who were the exiles? From Napoleonists to RevolutionariesPART I: A Liberal International? The Italian Exiles and the worldwide struggle for Freedom 1. A Liberal International: simultaneous revolutions and the birth of a trans-national civil society2. The Spanish Revolution, Italian volunteers and European3. In Search of New Models of Heroism: Revolutionary Leadership and Democratic Federalism in Spanish America4. Greece and the regeneration of the Mediterranean5. Cosmopolitan patriots: freedom and civilization as global processesPART II: England and Italy Compared 6. English institutions and Italian Freedom7. Assessing English Commercial society8. Narrating the Risorgimento to the British publicEpilogue: from Political Defeat to MemoryConclusionsBiographical AppendixBibliography

Risorgimento in Exile

Italian Emigres and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era

Maurizio Isabella

Author Information

Maurizio Isabella is Lecturer in Modern European History at Queen Mary College, University of London. He has been a Research fellow at Birkbeck College, London, and Stanley J. Seeger Fellow at Princeton University. This is his first book.

Risorgimento in Exile

Italian Emigres and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era

Maurizio Isabella

Reviews and Awards

"What emerges is the European and modern face of the Risorgimento as an integral part of the great ideological and political currents of the time...thus it transpires that the ultimate, specifically liberal outcome of the Risorgimento has deeper roots than had been thought...[A] serious and important book, written with both passion and thoughtful conviction."--Giuseppe Galasso, Corriere della Sera

"This is an impressive case study of the intellectual development of Italian exiles in the period 1815-35, ambitiously placing them in a transnational, even world context. In the field of Risorgimento history, it breaks new ground in reassessing pre-Mazzini activism and its impact on later generations. In the field of post-Napoleonic Europe, it provides a methodology for exploring diverse aspects of the anti-Metternich discourse and how those strands were intertwined together: it will be essential reading for historians of this period. Based on an impressive command of sources in French and Spanish (as well as the author's native Italian) the work also has a broader resonance for any historian wishing to consider transnational intellectual currents, their possibilities and limits, and even offers lessons for the present-day European Union. The quality of writing and the breadth of research in this work make it a real scholarly achievement."--Gladstone Prize Committee

"Isabella's analytical approach to the intersecting histories of exile, liberalism, and nationalism offers valuable new insights into the transnational exchanges and conflicts that shaped influential strands of early nineteenth-century Italian thought."-- American Historical Review

"This is a truly global history of the early nineteenth century, which brings together events in Italy, Greece, northwestern Europe and Latin America in a completely novel way."--Chris Bayly, University of Cambridge

"A compelling intellectual history and case study with ranging application in the study of revolutionary liberalism and transnational systems."--Nation and Nationalism

"An important contribution to a growing historiography engaged with rethinking Italian modernity...Broadly conceived, Isabella furnishes a sort of genealogy of nineteenth-century liberalism and nationalism; more particularly, he offers a view of the Italian participation in this process and insists that the earliest Risorgimento thinkers generated a dialectical synthesis of both Enlightenment and Romantic thought."-- Journal of Modern Italian Studies